Season 4, Episode 123 : Jeremy Smith

Will Richardson 00:03
Welcome to the Green Element Podcast. Thank you so much for joining us today, Jeremy. So you Jeremy Smith from tourism declares. And it would be great if you could just tell us a bit about yourself. And then a bit about the organisation tourism declares, please?

Jeremy Smith 00:20
Brilliant, thank you very much, Will. It's a pleasure to be here. So I'm Jeremy Smith. As you said, I'm co-founder of Tourism Declares a Climate Emergency or Tourism Declares as we are commonly known. My background is that I'm a writer who originally focused entirely on environmental issues from the turn of the millennium. And then from about 2007-2008, I focused on tourism and sustainability writing a couple of books, running a few websites doing quite a lot of consulting. Towards the end of last year, I started having conversations with a few other people in the industry about how we could motivate and mobilise our industry around meaningful climate action. And in January this year, that led to the launch of Tourism Declares.

Will Richardson 01:12
And do you as an organisation, do you incorporate, I mean, what, where do you start and stop within tourism? Because tourism is quite a big subject.

Jeremy Smith 01:22
Tourism is a very big subject. I mean, the industry likes to say that it's responsible for one in 10 jobs or supports one in 10 jobs and supports 10% of GDP. Those figures are challengeable, shall we say? But it's certainly an industry of enormous scale. We now have 135, we'll talk in more detail about what this means but to get we now have 135 members of our community of people who people or organisations who declared, which ranged from an individual, like myself, or a couple of bloggers who have declared and so one person up to visit Scotland, a National Tourism Organisation that was our first National Tourism Organisation to declare when they declared last week, we have one airline, some hotels, several tour operators, travel agents, people working in consulting and education in finance. So it stopped where tourism stops.

Will Richardson 02:23
Okay, so there is no definitive border or barrier, kind of...

Jeremy Smith 02:29
No, I think, I mean, the thing that is most, I think, is fairly unique about tourism, or fairly specific, let's say about tourism is its complexity and its spread, and that it does touch so many different things. And that, whereas if you talk to someone who works for a mining company, and I apologise to those people who work for mining companies who say I got this wrong, but one mining company and another mining company, they might mine a different mineral and use a different set of processes, but they're mining companies, but someone who works for a hotel. That day job is entirely different from someone who manages a fleet of vehicles or someone who's a tour operator or someone who works at an airport. So it's almost like loads of micro industries inside of one industry, that collaborates. And the fact there's an industry based around connection and community and movement vein that by its very nature means that we will connect an awful lot of different things.

Will Richardson 03:28
And what would you say your purpose was as an organisation?

Jeremy Smith 03:36
All depends on where you want to look at it. But our mission statement is that we want to encourage everyone working in tourism to declare a climate emergency and enable them all to publish a Climate Action Plan. The sort of back perk, the purpose behind that is that I, we have grown frustrated by the complexity, the variety of different interpretations on what we should be doing about climate action. And whether we should be chasing carbon neutral by 2050, net-zero by 2050, offsetting 30% of our emissions, chasing climate positive, etc, etc. All manner of different ways of doing things at different speeds, and so on. And this creates an enormous level of confusion, which then translates into your holidaymaker who wants to have a holiday and would like to do it in a way that was sustainable, had a light footprint, whatever it might be. And they get conflicting messages from a company that says it is very green because it's doing this and another company that says it's very green because it's doing something opposite. We felt that the industry, the travel industry, historically, set its own targets creates its own ways of doing things and yet increasingly outside of the industry in the wider industrial world or in society, and they're increasingly established frameworks for climate action, and whether that's through the IPCC, the Science-Based Targets, etc. And the focus that we saw as important is what is roughly summarise this cut global emissions in half by 2030. And to me, if you were coming towards the end of 2020, I can talk about what I'm going to do in 2021-22-23. Right up possibly 2029-2030. But if you start asking me what my plans are for 2045 and 2047, it's a meaningless question. And I can't in any way envision anything other than some sort of sci-fi response. What I do know is that if, if we want to achieve aims of carbon-neutral, net-zero by 2050, the best chance we have of doing them is to radically urgently address carbon emissions now.

Will Richardson 06:06
Yeah. And how radical do you think we should be?

Jeremy Smith 06:11
What? It depends on who is, I think but...

Will Richardson 06:15
I think we are everyone because I think that your industry effects. I would hazard a guess almost everyone. And we're talking about the UK here. We're a first-world country. But, you know, so I don't want to put my, you know, luxuries, onto what, and expect other people to have so many luxuries. But I do go on holiday. And I would hazard a guess that the majority of our listeners to go on holiday and the majority of people in the UK go on holiday and probably first world countries. So how radical do we as people who either work in the tourism industry, or we as people who use the tourism industry have to go do you think?

Jeremy Smith 07:08
I mean, my work is entirely industry focused on not talking directly to people making decisions about how to have their holidays, to separate compensation, which we could have, but it's really not what Tourism Declares is about being very much. Again, I feel that it's, tourism has historically said when the tourist demands it, we will deliver it. And I have always felt that what we need to do is to say, no, no, we know we need to do this. So we will do it so that the tourists can find it so that it can happen regardless. I don't see that we should wait for someone to demand that we make environmentally sustainable, environmentally unpolluting products before we make them think we should make them because we don't want to make polluting products.

Will Richardson 07:56
Yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah. So disseminating information and helping people.

Jeremy Smith 08:03
Yeah. And you said, how radical should we be? That is a very different part of the industry going back to was talking about it being a multifarious sort of industry, if you run a camping organisation, based in Dorset, or take cycling tours or, you know, take people on walks around the East End of London, then the radicalism of your climate action is very different to if you take people on giant 5000 person cruise holidays, or if you run an airline, and each one of those has a different role to play, and different net to grasp and different opportunities in terms of engagement. And what I'm trying to do, and I'm not going to pretend it's easy, is to find a place for all of those people working in all of those industries to acknowledge the challenges they each face, and maybe somehow find a space to come together to find solutions.

Will Richardson 09:03
When I think that, and I think there are solutions that. I mean, right when we first started, I was talking about how much good I think the travel industry does for the world. And how we can't be, we can't be black and white on an issue like this, because we're basically everyone knows old travels bad. You shouldn't travel. That's what we're told, as the general public the whole time. And I personally don't think that that's actually true. I think that there's an awful lot of good that comes out of travel. But equally, it's what how do we reduce the emissions on that travel as well and what do we and how do we play a part? As listeners to this podcast, we'll know Green Elements and Compare Your Footprints are not firm advocates of carbon offsetting per se but equally, we talked to some of your members and people that work in the travel industry that rather than put money into, say, an offset programme that has dubious, actual positive outcomes, that the best part, why not invest in, I don't know, newer technologies for airlines to be reducing those impacts, changing our conversations around what it is that we're doing, will have more of a long term positive impacts, then the short term ism, which we tend to jump on quite quickly.

Jeremy Smith 10:44
Yeah, I think, again, it depends on whether we're talking about individual choices or corporate choices. But I believe that the power you know, I believe, obviously, I believe in the potential of travel to do good. I'm not here working in tourism for the last decade, because I'm an anti-travel advocate, I love greatly the industry, or the love greatly the process of travelling and discovery, I think that we have made too much of an assumption that that process necessitates and is improved by distance. And that the further I go, and the more you know, inverted commas, exotic the places I go, the more rewarding and greater the experience that I have. Yet, in the UK, where we have more flights per capita than any other country in the world for leisure, still, 50% of the country didn't get on an airplane and go on holiday last year. And the vast majority of people did take some form of holiday, did travel in some way. But they found their pleasures, for whatever reason, without necessarily getting on an airplane. So we don't have to automatically assume that when we're talking about travel, what we're talking about is flying. We're talking about leaving the place where you live, and leaving the process of getting up each day and going to work and taking yourself away somewhere else to relax. And then I think we're in and that's a very different conversation to just the idea of talking about the mechanisms of getting on airplanes and going places.

Will Richardson 12:21
Good. Okay. That's, and that's, I think that's where, and it's that education, isn't it? And it's I think it's talking about it helps to, for people to understand what we're talking about, and what more environmental tourism means.

Jeremy Smith 12:42
And not just my environment, I mean, one of the most wonderful organisations and you know, happily given name check to the Family Holiday Association, based in the UK, whose core purpose is to ensure that those people from families that simply cannot afford a holiday, whether their concept for holiday is something way beyond their means, to enable them to get some form of break, that gives them literally give them a break, that gives them the chance to see something beyond the narrow confines of their life that gives them the opportunity to do a child who's 13 years old, who's never been to the beach, going to a beach and it might just be you know, something I'm not talking about going to the Maldives, I'm talking about, you know, going to wherever, you know, the beach, and any one of the beaches that surround the UK. And that is treating tourism as a social good. And there's an enormous point of value in that. We see it in doctors in the Orkney Islands. There's a story last year I think it was about doctors in the Orkney Islands prescribing, birdwatching, and rambling rather than pills to people. Now basically, they were giving them saying what a holiday is going to be better for you than taking these antidepressants. So there's undoubtedly something and that's what I think we have to always unpackage the idea that it's about a flight, because it's not it's about whatever it is, I mean, for me, it's about going on a long walk and connecting with nature. It's about spending time with my wife and getting up late and you know, making a big meal. But that's just my version of it for other people it will be about you know, whatever it is cycling, skiing, exploring a new city going to an art gallery.

Will Richardson 14:21
Yeah. And how did what how do you engage people with your messaging? What is there anything that you have done that you've thought that really works really well, in the way that you've engaged people with your communication?

Jeremy Smith 14:41
Yeah, I think, we took a long time, we spent three months before we launched the initiative, working out how to launch it, and what we should do and knowing that calling yourself Tourism Declares a Climate Emergency meant that there was a certain sort of. It was then jarred when you came out. And we studied a lot of the pledges that had happened in tourism, and there were a lot of those out there. And I, we were concerned that it's the bike saying to someone, here's our pledge, come tick a box saying you agree with it on you go, that doesn't actually create that great deal of engagement, it's, it's quite easy to do, there's no real barrier to entry, you can just say, Yeah, I agree with those things, and move on. So what we said as the core commitment of what we did what anyone does, who declared a climate emergency is different. First of all, they declare the climate emergency on their own website. So all those 135 organisations, individuals, companies who have declared now have a page on their website, which is that tourism declares commitment. So every single one of them has committed to do that. And the second thing is, they've also committed to publishing the Climate Action Plan, so outlining the beginning of their journey towards climate action, within 12 months of declaring. So we both time-limited and said, you're going to be doing something with this within the next 12 months, and you're going to put something on your, you're going to own this, you're going to put it onto your own website. And what I did is it slowed the process of growth down enormously, because I'm sure if we had just found out it was found out, we just put out a website and said, you can click here, we probably would have many more signatures now than which we do. But one of the most rewarding things has been the number of conversations I've had with people subsequent to them declaring what they've said. We thought this was going to be just a really simple process. And we thought it was great. So then we sat down and started doing it. And then it became a conversation. And then we wanted to do it properly. So we thought, Well, if we're going to do this, we're gonna do it properly. And that's why it's taken us three months to declare, or three weeks or whatever it might be. And to know that, without necessarily having done anything about it actively work directly out there, companies were sitting around as a team as a group and making having a conversation internally about what climate action meant for them told me that we were bedding in, we were actually engaging with them beyond the way that we could have possibly imagined. And then, of course, because they then publish on their website, they then share the page on their website, and they then share it into their networks. And so it means that rather than having one central point with 135 signatures on it, there's 135 pages shared into 135 social networks, and etc, etc, etc. And that, to me was a far all that's taken more time. I think it's created by that sort of distributed network has created a far stronger process of engagement in the long run.

Will Richardson 17:49
Yeah, no. And so where do you see? I mean, are you based in the UK?

Jeremy Smith 17:56
I live in France, but my co-founder lives in the UK.

Will Richardson 18:02
I guess what I'm just wondering is, how UK centric, are you?

Jeremy Smith 18:08
We're not. We by nature of human connection. I lived in London until last October. And I lived in London all my life. And now I live in France. So by nature, a lot of my friends and contacts in the industry are people who I could meet for a coffee or a beer within London at various times. So of course, we have a strong network in the UK. And that has meant that there probably are currently more UK companies than any other country. But that's not the same as saying, there certainly aren't more UK companies as in, there's not it's not half UK. I mean, I don't actually know what it is, but I'm going to say it's a quarter. And that's just a top of head number we have from all over the world and absolutely global and all other forms of broadening the diversity and representation of what we do is the core of what we're about we will succeed when we represent the whole of the travel industry.

Will Richardson 19:03
Brilliant. Brilliant, because that's what that's really important isn't it that we actually there's so many good initiatives that come out of so many different countries but it's a worldwide effort to I actually don't like the word combat climate change to be honest it's just it's because actually is the wrong word is actually the wrong word. Because it's not, it's not a war on climate change.

Jeremy Smith 19:32
I've read a lot of stuff on that I've done something that before we there's been all these things like carbon war rooms and the battle against the climate. It's like guys, if it's a battle we lose and we just need to find our way back into balance with the atmosphere of which we're part and yeah, now I'm not in a war with climate change. I'm in a seek to remove. So who is it says it someone says that you know, the climate emergency is carbon in the wrong place. And when we put carbon dioxide back where it works to be the building block of life, it's a great thing. When there's too much of it in the atmosphere, it's problematic. We, we need to learn how to rebalance our activities with the self-regulating system of yeah.

Will Richardson 20:22
Yeah, no, absolutely. Absolutely. It's a job that needs to be done fast.

Jeremy Smith 20:31
Right so.

Will Richardson 20:32
I've got a presentation to do tomorrow to a company, and I quite like doing them because you end up thinking about, you know, what are we doing? And it's not, I actually don't do them all the time. I used to do them fairly often, for some reason. But you end up just going actually, we are actually, we are getting there. I think I honestly think we're getting there. I always come out of them feeling quite positive, when you start doing quite a lot of research on where we're going and what we're doing. Because there's so many organisations like you that are working with so many other organisations trying to reduce the environmental impact of organisations.

Jeremy Smith 21:20
I think there's also I mean, the thing I felt. if I felt one positive from this wretched year, has been that people went through, you know, limited alternative opportunities, or whatever it might be, and maybe the design side of the world, I live in a tourism, but the desire to collaborate, as you said, do to move on from sort of competitive war mentality towards the idea of let's work together, let's find ways to share what you know, and share what your challenges are, and swap what I know and swap out my challenges are, and there's a sort of I mean, I think the experiences of this year have undoubtedly shown us the need for collaboration, support, working together. And I think increasingly, people are saying, Well, listen, we're in this together, and let's work together. And that is a positive thing. And maybe, as you said, there's a critical mass of solutions, initiatives, etc, happening, where the nature of exponential growth is, you don't notice it till it goes to a certain point in exponential growth, as we've likewise noticed quite regularly this year. And an A positive, that works positively. And it might just be that all of a sudden, I mean, I've been talking about carbon and environmental issues for 20 years. And it was a quiet, only conversation 20 years ago. It's not now.

Will Richardson 22:50
That I tried getting a job as an environmental manager 20 years ago, and I couldn't go on because I didn't have any experience. And then I thought, Well, how do I get experience? If you don't get me here? It was rubbish. That's why I ended up working for myself. In the end, it wasn't a bad thing but I tried to get into an industry. Yeah, it didn't really exist.

Jeremy Smith 23:15
Just now, though, isn't it? And that's, you know, and it's good. And I noticed that someone was asking me about how I felt the climate conversation was going and I said, Well, you know, x years ago, I would have been told by an editor. Oh, no, we did climate change in April. We're doing it again next year. It's not on the slate for the editorial calendar for the rest of the year. And now, you'll be in a conversation with people and the conversation isn't about is it shouldn't do. How bad is it? It is a competence isn't the conversation that this came up? It was on this web summit thing I was in last week. And one person was there discussing the merits of drawing down carbon from the atmosphere and someone else was there discussing the merits of natural solutions and someone else's just nature-based solutions and someone else's. We were discussing nuanced varieties of solutions that our industry could get involved with, which is considerably further down the conversation than, Is it really that scary?

Will Richardson 24:15
Yeah, yeah. But I think the knowledge of people has got more over the years. I think that we have been talking about their subjects for quite a long time now. And okay, yeah, they were definitely cycles of where people were talking about it. But I think the fact that people do they're not their ground knowledge is actually quite high, particularly as a lot of the younger generation have been taught about it in schools for the last 10 years as well. So therefore, you've got 10 years worth of the population, that actually the working population actually understands what's going on. And then anyone under the age of 18 understands what's going on. So you've almost got 30 years of our population, which let's say is a third that actually have educationally been talking about it. And then I would say the mid, the next third, people have been educated by the media for a long time. So I think that's absolutely also helped that kind of tipping points that's happened.

Jeremy Smith 25:25
I think that is undoubtedly correct. And I mean, they don't need to go on about it. But there's no doubt about it, that it's in years, we launched with the Australian bushfires raging California, but other parts of America had bushfires, you know, decades worth local storms across the East Africa, we hit so many hurricanes in the Atlantic that we went past giving them names and started just naming them after letters of the Greek alphabet. It's the mass of evidence is increasingly there. And it's not we're not talking about climate change in 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, we're talking about the lived experience of people all around the world.

Will Richardson 26:12
And where do you I mean, where do you see your organisation going? What do you see as a good thing going forwards?

Jeremy Smith 26:24
I think if we can play our part in normalising across the travel industry, reporting and measuring and acting on climate so that as many companies and organisations as possible, and not just the big ones for whom it's a legal requirement, but the industry is making, you know, what do you want to call it with a climate budget as much as it has a budget for where it spends its money and where it allocates its resources, if they start considering that they have to think that way inside of those planetary boundaries. And then they start sharing challenges and ideas and best practices with one another. So that we build from the idea of doing it to the idea of doing it better to the idea of establishing what are the best ways we can do it and sharing those resources at that point, or increase in and I'm talking about that over the course of the next year or two, then I think we are, then we're at a good place as an industry to use our remarkable, perhaps unparalleled ability to engage, because people are going back to what you're saying earlier, away from work, rested, relaxed, in the process of discovery, to then say to them, Look, here's what we've been doing, here's some really exciting stuff, you can come and stay in our whatever it might be solar powered Lodge, eat from the permaculture garden, go on our X and Y tours that augment and live a low and eventually zero-emissions lifestyle. And it's not sacrificed, it's pleasurable. And if we can actually get to a point of being able to sort of envision and then build that as a sort of experimental lab for the world, then I mean, we will be doing a hugely vital and I believe, beneficial role.

Will Richardson 28:24
Brilliant. And if there's one thing you'd like our listeners to take away from this conversation with you, what would that be, please?

Jeremy Smith 28:36
If your listeners are in the travel industry, and therefore Tourism Declares is open to them, then, of course, I would like them to think that it doesn't matter for one piece doesn't matter at all, whether they are a pioneer in climate action, are literally staring at a blank sheet of paper and no idea what to do. If they want to be part of the framework that we've adopted, and part of the community that we are building. We're there for anyone, wherever they are in their journey to work together and find answers and support one another in addressing it. Which I actually think you know, I mean, I don't have a huge amount of say to people who aren't outside of tourism, because I'm working my life in tourism. But I don't really see why that shouldn't be the same principle for everyone. I mean, when we tend to overly pedestal, we go, oh, my God, look at the expert. The expert knows everything. They're the ones I can never be like them. Therefore I don't have a role to play. And I prefer to dismantle that and to say, if you want to be part of this, find your role. And everyone can do something.

Will Richardson 29:47
Yeah. Look after the pennies and the pounds look after themselves, basically, isn't it? And how do we connect? How do we connect with you and learn more?

Jeremy Smith 29:57
You can connect at our website which is tourismdeclares.com. There's obviously easy ways to connect directly through the website or you can just send an email to info@tourismdeclares.com, if someone wants to connect with me directly, I'm on Twitter at JMC Smith or my own website for the work I do is jmcsmith.com.

Will Richardson 30:23
And that's writing?

Jeremy Smith 30:25
Writing, consulting. Obviously, I'm here talking for Tourism Declares but if someone wants to talk to me about writing and consulting, delighted to have that conversation, but for Tourism Declares we are tourismdeclares.com and then for every social channel, it's at tourism declares, regardless of which, social channel you look at.

Will Richardson 30:44
Brilliant, brilliant, thank you so much for being on today. It's been really, really interesting Talking to you, and yeah, listen to more.

Jeremy Smith 30:52
Well, thank you very much for having me. It's a pleasure.